The Simbul's Gift

by Lynn Abbey

  “Elminster?” Bro knew the name. Everyone alive knew Elminster’s name. “Is Elminster involved in this?”

  Chayan scowled. “Elminster? Who said anything about Elminster?”

  “You did, just now. You said ‘Elminster, you hairy old goat, this is all your fault.’—”

  “You heard me say that?” She scowled deeper and stared at his hand, still clutching the knife, before she shook her head. “I must be getting tired. It’s something we said fighting the Tuigans. Whenever something went wrong: Elminster, this is your fault.”

  Bro walked beside her another few steps before saying, “You said it in Trade.” He meant the common human language of all Faerûn.

  “There weren’t many Cha’Tel’Quessir up fighting the Tuigans, Ebroin. You pick up a lot of languages when you spend your life fighting other folk’s battles. Wait and see, when I’m truly exhausted, I might start cursing in goblin or orc.”

  Bro didn’t expect to hear either of those exotic languages any time soon. He wasn’t entirely convinced Chayan was tired. Rizcarn certainly wasn’t. He was striding across the moonlit ground as if he’d just awakened from a good night’s sleep and Chayan was having no trouble keeping up with him. The sell-sword was as strange as everything else in Bro’s strange journey from Sulalk to who-knew-where, but when she held out her hand, he grasped it without hesitation.

  There were eight, not eleven, Cha’Tel’Quessir waiting for them when they got back to the fire. Rizcarn said they should start walking again. Bro argued, saying they should wait until dawn and look for more survivors. He turned to Chayan, expecting her support, but she was as stone-faced as the others.

  “Do you want to be in this place when the sun comes up?” she asked.

  “No, but—”

  “There are no more survivors, Ebroin.”

  “The dead?”

  “It took four men half a day to dig Lanig’s grave.”

  “Their beads?”

  Chayan patted a pouch at her waist. “I have all I could find.”

  Rizcarn was leading the other eight away.

  “This is war, Ebroin.” She held out her hand again:

  Bro shook it off. “It’s Sulalk. It’s the same as Sulalk.” He had an unwelcome vision of crows and vultures perched on the cottage roof. “It’s not right,” he muttered, on the verge, suddenly, of tears. “It’s not fair.”

  “It never is, Ebroin.”

  She took his hand and led him away.

  They walked through dawn and into a bright, cool morning. Fewer people made faster progress along the trail. Bro recognized the forest now, in a general way. Details had changed in seven years, of course, but he knew when they were near MightyTree and said nothing as they walked past the trails that would have taken him south and west to home.

  Rizcarn called a midday halt. Two of the Cha’Tel’Quessir fell asleep as soon as they sat. The rest ate what they had before closing their eyes. Rizcarn found a suitable rock to use with his chisel and started carving Relkath’s rune into every tree large enough to hold it. Chayan told Bro to take a nap while she kept watch.

  “Once I fall asleep, you’re going to go off and talk to your cousin.”

  “You have a suspicious mind, Ebroin.”

  “But you are, aren’t you? You wouldn’t have walked away if you hadn’t known he was alive. You’re going to ask him about the Red Wizards, whether they were close enough to get killed, and tell him what you’ve seen, so he can tell the Simbul.”

  “And I suppose you’ll follow me, if I don’t invite you to come along?”

  He didn’t bother answering the question, but got up and walked with her. Trovar Halaern waited in the crook of a tree no more than three hundred paces from where they’d been sitting. The forester was tired and ragged.

  “Bad storm last night, cousin,” he said as he leapt down from the tree. “Worse for you though. I see Rizcarn survived, and Ebroin. You’re still headed for the Sunglade?”

  “Zandilar has Ebroin’s colt. My bones say she’s going to dance tonight whether we’re there or not. What about our Red Wizard spies? How did they fare last night?”

  “Better than they deserved, my—cousin. Wet and frightened and convinced that they’re on the right trail. They outnumber you now, almost two to one. Rizcarn seems to be a changed man.”

  “Several times over,” Chayan agreed. “I’m starting to think that corpse the Simbul found—”

  Halaern cleared his throat. “The foresters found it, cousin, following her suggestions.”

  “I knew I didn’t find it. But it wasn’t wholly Cha’Tel’Quessir or Red Wizard, and I don’t think Rizcarn is, either.”

  “That should make tonight more than interesting.”

  Chayan nodded. “I think it’s time to make it less interesting. Ebroin had a good idea the other day. There’re too many Red Wizards in the Yuirwood.”

  “And the Simbul?”

  “If she asks, we’ll blame it on Elminster, won’t we, Ebroin?”

  “Elminster?” Halaern looked from his cousin to Bro.

  “It’s a joke, I think,” Bro explained. He wished he’d had the sense to stay with the other Cha’Tel’Quessir. When Chayan and her cousin bantered, he felt like a child who only understood every other word in adult conversation. “I overheard her cursing Elminster last night after the storm. She said it was a habit she picked up fighting the Tuigans.”

  “You never mentioned that, cousin.”

  Chayan flashed a dangerously toothsome grin. “When do we have a chance to talk, cousin? What about our solitaire Red Wizard, the one that followed Rizcarn out of the camp when it was west of here? At first you said you thought it was a woman. Why? And do you still think so?”

  “Before Rizcarn left, I found a footprint, small and narrow. It could’ve come from a child or a halfling, but my best guess was a woman. I haven’t seen any more. She’s smarter than the others, I think, and she’s alone, or nearly so. I never saw her, only felt her presence, and I haven’t felt it since Rizcarn left. She’s stopped using magic.”

  Chayan seemed lost in her own thoughts. Bro seized an opportunity to ask a question that had been very important two days ago. “Did Rizcarn actually visit MightyTree? He said he would, but he wasn’t gone long enough, even if he ran day and night.”

  “It would seem that he did, Ebroin. According to Urell, Rizcarn, or something like him, appeared at his door in the middle of the night and gave him his daughter’s necklace. Rizcarn said he couldn’t stay, but wanted a mourning bead, so Urell gave him one off his own neck. That is MightyTree work.” The forester pointed to the bead in question.

  “How?”

  “Why not ask him yourself?” Chayan asked, more an order than a question. She turned to Halaern. “You’ll join me after?”

  “Yes,” he agreed, but she was already walking away, not as quiet as a forester, but quiet enough that she was quickly gone. “Come on, Ebroin. I’ll walk you back to the others.”

  Bro folded his arms. “I’m not a child, Trovar Halaern, and I saw what Red Wizards can do to a whole village. She’s got a sword, that’s all. She doesn’t even have her spear anymore and she decides—just like that—that she’s going to destroy the Red Wizards?”

  Halaern nodded. “Let’s go, Ebroin.”

  “Chayan’s not what she says she is, is she?”

  “She’s very good at what she does, and one of the things she does is destroy her enemies, including Red Wizards.”

  “She’s not your cousin.”

  The forester gave up with a sigh. “No, Ebroin, Chayan’s not my cousin; and she’s not what she seems, either.”

  “She’s Zandilar in disguise, isn’t she?”

  Halaern was speechless. Bro was pleased with himself and his guess. He started back to the napping Cha’Tel’Quessir. A twig snapped; the forester must be so flustered that he was making noise as he caught up. Bro turned around. He saw a shadow, then a face, then hands that grabbed him.

/>   He heard a voice from deeper in the shadow: “Good, Lailomun, my pet. You caught him. Now bring him here.”

  Bro struggled and as he did he heard another voice, the forester’s, but it came too late. He fell forward into darkness.

  26

  The Yuirwood, in Aglarond

  Afternoon, the twenty-fourth day of Eleasias, The Year of the Banner (1368DR)

  The queen of Aglarond shed her Cha’Tel’Quessir disguise as she walked through the forest, in search of Thayan wizardry. She became herself, silver haired, blue eyed, and deadly, but still dressed in the durable leather garments Chayan SilverBranch had worn. Her shadow, cast by the sun and by magic, rustled branches as she moved beneath them. The Simbul, when she was hunting Red Wizards, scorned stealth.

  A Red Wizard, especially a solitary novice sent to keep an eye on the Cha’Tel’Quessir, knew he was in trouble well before he knew what that trouble was. Alassra heard the novice break into a noisy run, headed straight for his companions. They’d be waiting for her, ready as they could be; that concerned her not at all. Fair play was a worthy notion in children’s games, but when it came to squashing one’s enemies, the Simbul liked to have them facing her and concentrated in a single location where lightning and fire were most effective. If Mythrell’aa had been among them, Alassra might have changed her tactics, but Mythrell’aa was surely the solitaire and the reason Alassra was exterminating lesser nuisances.

  It was difficult for one wizard to judge the true might of another. Above a certain level of proficiency, all wizards were liars. The Simbul fostered notions that she was reckless—not entirely untrue—and careless with her wizardry, when in truth, she detested magical surprises and meticulously planned her spellcasting. The result, as she intended, was that her enemies both feared her and continually underestimated her.

  By hard-learned habit, Alassra never underestimated her enemies. She assumed Mythrell’aa had the means to do whatever she wanted. And Illusion’s means, full of shadow and guile, were particularly difficult to combat. The Simbul didn’t want her concentration muddied with echoes and novices. She also didn’t want to light up the afternoon sky with incendiary spells. As she approached the clump of Red Wizards, poorly concealed in trees and behind bushes, she reached into her belt pouch and retrieved a brightly painted goose egg. Walking into their woeful trap, she presented her usual array of defensive spells and a deadly surprise, encased in the goose egg.

  An assortment of spells came her way as she lobbed the egg into their midst. Most of the spells, fireballs, and magic arrows fizzled when they got within three paces of her. The wizards had never learned that she was immune to their most common spells. Of course, very few of them survived long enough to share the knowledge.

  One of the Red Wizards, thinking quickly but erroneously, launched a spell at the painted egg. It would have cracked and begun its work when it struck the ground, but breaking it in midair was more effective. Once released, an invisible sphere expanded until it was ten paces across. Pushing the Yuirwood air ahead, it left suffocating emptiness behind. Bug-eyed and choking, the wizards died swiftly.

  The sphere wasn’t impermeable. Alassra watched for escapees. Two thought they were safe until she hurled poison-dipped stars at their necks and dropped them before they’d filled their lungs with fresh air. The larger of the pair, a portly man with a thick wattle of flesh beneath his tattooed chin, was still alive when she reached him. Poison had already turned his face dark blue and stiffened his limbs. He was in agony; there had been days in Alassra’s life when she would have stood back to watch him die. Being queen, however, had taught her to value efficiency, if not mercy.

  She took a moment to ask a question:

  “Are there others, not caught with you?”

  He lied, of course, but the Simbul took the truth directly from his mind before ending his life: they’d stood united and died the same way. Alassra removed her throwing star from his flesh and, after cleaning it carefully, returned it to the leather case where she kept a score of the deadly metal bits.

  By habit she stripped the wizards of anything obviously useful. Red Wizards carried the best weapons, the best gear, magical or otherwise, that their wealth could provide and most of it was neither inherently good nor evil. Two of their daggers had malignant personalities that challenged her when she touched them; the Simbul destroyed those immediately, but stowed the rest in a pouch similar to the one she wore that was larger within than without. Their gold and silver, jewelry, and their bodies she left behind for scavengers.

  The other clutch of Red Wizards was harder to find. The Simbul would have liked her chief forester’s help, but she didn’t need it. There was a good chance that Bro needed Trovar Halaern’s wisdom more than she needed his tracking skills. She continued circling around the Cha’Tel’Quessir and had cleared about two-thirds of the circumference when she came upon the wizards, surprising herself as much as she surprised them.

  Alassra was just as glad Halaern was elsewhere. She’d never handled embarrassment well, and the first moments of the skirmish were nothing short of embarrassing, with frantic Red Wizards hopping about, trying to make good use of their last moments and her having to bring them down one by one. This group was larger than the first and supported with archers, who, having no spells and few choices in their memories, kept their wits better than the wizards did, although their arrows, which burst into all-consuming flames as they neared her, were no more effective than fireballs.

  She slew them all and could only hope that, in the confusion, no Red Wizard had managed to slip away. Halaern could deal with that problem. He’d had enough time to solve the world’s problems, let along Ebroin of MightyTree’s.

  Halaern—dear friend—

  When there was no immediate answer, the Simbul searched her mind for the circlet’s echo. It proved cold and nearly lifeless beneath her mental fingers. Carefully controlling her thoughts, Alassra took two measured steps to the right, then two more, listening to the echo. When she had Halaern’s location fixed in her mind, she started running. She reassembled her Cha’Tel’Quessir disguise as she ran.

  Alassra found the forester in the brush between the tree where they’d talked and the camp where the Cha’Tel’Quessir napped, oblivious to all danger. Halaern’s arms were swollen to the elbow and discolored with the black-and-white patches of severe frostbite—hardly the injury she expected to see in height of summer. Bro was nowhere to be seen. As she knelt beside her unconscious friend, the Simbul had a bad feeling that she knew what had happened.

  Halaern could have healed himself more easily than she could, had he been conscious. The foresters had mastered the Yuirwood’s magic before they came to her. Her circlets enhanced their power, but didn’t create it. However, he wasn’t conscious. Alassra tried to rouse him with his name, with gentle pressure on both his shoulder, and with vaporous white crystals she carried as a purifying reagent. When nothing worked, she opened a shiny steel vial and began working ointment into the discolored flesh.

  Halaern came to when she had one arm nearly restored to its natural dimensions and color. His eyes filled with comprehension, then closed with a sigh.

  “I lost him, my queen.”

  “The solitaire?” Alassra asked, knowing the answer. She continued massaging the ointment into his arm.

  The forester levered himself into a sitting position. “One moment he was there. The next there was a shadow around him. I wasn’t quick enough. I wasn’t where I should have been.”

  Alassra started on his other arm. “You did your best. It’s my fault for leaving everyone unprotected. While I was here, she couldn’t get close enough. Once I’d left … It would have happened anyway, Halaern. Don’t blame yourself.”

  Halaern shook his head. “It is my fault, my lady. I wasn’t beside him. He’d said something outrageous—that you were Zandilar—and I let him get ahead of me. If I’d been beside him—”

  “I would have lost both of you. The solitaire is a zu
lkir, my friend. The Zulkir of Illusion and an old, old enemy. I’ve expected her since I arrived in the forest. She’s a small woman. When you mentioned a small, isolated footprint, I knew which one was her, but I thought I still had time to trap her. I was wrong. My mistake. My fault.”

  Halaern applied internal healing to his discolored flesh and the wounds faded like frost. “My heart lies heavy to think what a zulkir will do with him.”

  “No heavier than mine.” They began walking to the Cha’Tel’Quessir. “But don’t lose hope entirely. It won’t satisfy her to take him. Whatever she has in mind—and I have a few guesses on that score—she won’t do it unless I witness it. Well have a chance. Mystra’s mercy, well have a chance.”

  “Did you solve your other problems?”

  “Yes, for all the good it’s done us.”

  Rizcarn was still carving runes. He set down his rock and chisel when he saw Chayan and Trovar Halaern of Yuirwood walking grim-faced toward him.

  Mythrell’aa hated the Yuirwood, hated the buzzing insects, the bits of dead leaves that got into her robes and made her skin itch. She hated last night’s rain and wind, even though she’d made herself a secure shelter against it. She hated today’s mud that ruined her sandals and made her stumble. She hated everything about the forest, but she was deeply satisfied that she’d made the journey from Bezantur.

  The mongrel—Alassra’s pet—lay blind and silent on the ground, fighting futilely against the spells she’d lashed around his body and his will.

  The thing Mythrell’aa hated most about the Yuirwood was its effect on her magic. Everything was more difficult, as if the very rocks and trees ranged themselves against her. But the forest hadn’t withstood her shadows, especially not when Lailomun cast them and walked within them. Keeping Lailomun’s attention, though, was a trial. The man’s mind faded so quickly; she’d had to relax his compulsions just so he could obey her commands.